The Thirteenth Labour

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The Thirteenth Labour is the name of a puzzle card associated with Perplex City, an alternate reality game created by the British company Mind Candy. Perplex City features puzzle cards which can be solved to earn points on an online leaderboard and earn clues to help understand and continue the game. One of these cards, entitled The Thirteenth Labour, features a large block of hexadecimal numbers, with the text "64/12/8" at the top, and five cow symbols at the bottom.

The Thirteenth Labour is card number 251 (of 256 total), and was released as part of the first wave (one of the first sets of cards available to the public). It is one of 32 silver cards (the color indicating the hardest difficulty, and also highest rarity). It is particularly noteworthy as it is one of the few puzzle cards available which remains unsolved by any of the thousands of Perplex City players to date.

Most of those actively attempting to solve this card currently believe the text to be a block of RC5-64bit encrypted data, and a distributed computing client has been created to attempt to brute-force crack the encryption (client and status are available here).

[edit] Prizes

The excellent prizes for the person who finds the winning key

A number of prizes have been donated by Mind Candy and Perplex City players for the owner of the machine that finds the correct key. The prize pool currently stands at:

Terra Incognita
We Be Rational Pirates poster
A sock puppet
All wave 1 and 2 red, yellow, orange, green, blue and purple
Black #208, #209. #210, #212, #213
Silver #251 (The Thirteenth Labour)
Offers of several new packs of cards

...and from Mind Candy:

a poster
t-shirt
starter pack
a card signed by the artist who designed the Whipsmart Ice site
and maybe a few packs of Wave 3 cards too!!

[edit] Statistics

On 26th June 2006 the statistics stand as:

Roughly 1000 Clients
32.25% of keyspace covered
Over 4.7 million work units complete

This dramatic increase in the statistics has come about as a direct result of some major improvements in the speed and efficiency of the client software. This allows users to complete work units much faster.